Google is the biggest middle man of them all. There just eliminating the middle man competition.

Their practices will catch up to them sooner or later and their going to get smacked by the FTC when enough of these middleman businesses start complaining. Can't wait for the breakup of all their groups. Should be interesting.

Until then, they run the show so unless you fit into the mold of their vision of what and how a business should be run, you won't get much love from Google.

Thanks for sharing the NPR story - audio has more color compared to the transcript. The interview refers to an ecommerce site and thus does not apply to other genres such as online magazines, news, blogs and so on.

Personally 95% or what I buy online is on eBay. And I notice that many of my favorite merchants also have websites on the side which are mostly disasters <GRIN>

For my personal needs eBay is preferred as there is a depth of products, prices, shipping etc. I would need to spend hours rooting around to locate otherwise.

People hotlink to them, Google takes them for Google Images, but they don't help with Panda. I really should prevent Google from taking them, but I think they might be useful for link juice.

I have alot of good, detailed images on my ecomm store as well and they are made specifically for the visitors and lately I try not to concentrate on link juice or what Google thinks of the product page - such as color, font, layout, descriptions.

Good, thorough product details in images and specs instills confidence with the visitors and can keep them on your site longer.

I can see visitors browsing through our products, categories, photos and specs and those are good signs as they are spending a good amount of time on our site - which can lead to return visits and conversions.

If Google measures visitors time spent on a site or if visitors return, as discussed in other threads, then this is good and hopefully this will raise your overall rankings.

I retouch them, color correct, sharpen and do everything to make them the best photos of the particular models on the internet.

And this is what a LOT of "middlemen" do ~ take the source product and improve it's presentation on the WWW. The photos are often made better (not only re-touched, but also optimized for faster downloading); the information about the product is expanded; the product is linked into other relevant pages (for context). And the website itself may also be better for all the above reasons, plus with better navigation and less clutter.

So this push by Google to place the "source" closer to the top, without regards to the points above, and putting the middlemen down the list, is yet one more example (as though we need one more) why Panda is a fraud.

So this push by Google to place the "source" closer to the top, without regards to the points above, and putting the middlemen down the list, is yet one more example (as though we need one more) why Panda is a fraud.

Say you want to buy a red cog. You've never bought a red cog before and you want to be sure you get it. What are your best odds to get the cog without any hassle or fraud? Buying it directly from the maker or a reseller you've had no previous experience with?

Say the reseller sells the product cheaper. Fair enough, everyone likes a deal. But guess who likely sells it cheaper or equal to the reseller? That's right, the large sites...eBay, Amazon, Overstock, etc. They also have more trust/PR for Google when it comes to rankings.

I'm not saying this is fair but that's what's happening. The small resellers are being pushed out, and it's even worse than in a local town where people still have some loyalty towards a Mom and Pop store. The Mom and Pop website won't exist much longer unless they sell their own unique products.

Panda is just helping mold the future of Google product results based on what Google is striving for.

#1. The source #2-#X. Large resellers, Large review sites #Y-#Z. Small resellers, small review sites

just as easily compared to see if it's just the same old content being copied.

Good advice. For my sites, I never use the graphic file names supplied by merchants. I always rename to make the filename more descriptive, so instead of item0344-150x225.jpg, I would use round-blue-widget_150x225.jpg.

The Mom and Pop website won't exist unless they sell their own unique products.

@StoutFiles, I actually agree with your analysis as to what Google intends, but certainly see no evidence that bigger is better (nor do you suggest that). Often the opposite is true. It's been said here in a couple places that with the exception of original art/craft, and small independent manufacturers, MOST of the online selections are sold at multiple sites. At least that's how it used to be, but with Google/Panda wiping out so many siteowners, their vision of limited choices via established name brands is sure to change the landscape.

I just looked and they have close to 400 links on each page. The description even if unique will probably be drowned among all that template text.

>> "I'm not saying this is fair but that's what's happening."

DUH, that's why we're complaining. Panda is now giving large sites almost 100% of traffic, even the crumbs. Just because Google is doing it doesn't make it right and doesn't mean it will stick. Google is famous and popular for one reason: users and especially the tech savvy ones. This is how their undoing will come...and FTC and EU and state lawsuits for monopoly and using search to drive competitors out of business.

Paul Edmondson, HubPages CEO just published post in TechCrunch. This paragraph says it all

We are concerned that Google is targeting platforms other than its own and stifling competition by reducing viable platform choices simply by diminishing platforms’ ability to rank pages. Google is not being transparent about their new standards, which prevents platforms like ours from having access to a level playing field with Google’s own services. We want to comply with and exceed Google’s standards. Google has my contact information. Hope to hear from them soon.

Well, hubpages and the likes deserved a demotion but he makes a good point. What percentage of Youtube is shallow content? When money is at stake, your motives are questioned. Just ask Larry Page and Sergey.

Well, hubpages and the likes deserved a demotion but he makes a good point.

Agree, don't you think blogspot, eHow deserve demotion too. They just played a game with eHow, just manually demoted eHow little bit after Apr 11th, and then two weeks later, eHow is again topping the first page for most of the results.

What bothers me is that obviously the long tail got hit again and that it is impossible for some to work with unique content in that field.

If you are distributing music and sound effects and "Pink Floyd - The Wall - 7:31 - 320 kbps" or "Car driving by, 20 seconds, WAV" can only become unique content, if I add a lot of text to it, nobody wants to read but Google.

Or I build listing pages, reshuffling titles in a way it looks unique. Yet, that does not say ANYTHING about the quality of my content. There is no algo to solve these kinds of searches as far as I can see.

All searches I do at the moment in my niche show non-fitting results in the top 10 spots. Always 2-3 great ones, but also at least 5 that make me want to use another search engine.

@Bewenched:

So ecomm sites will just start hiding the brands so they can get the searches for the other descriptions

What has provided Google with the power of imposing their views on millions of businesses all over their world is their monopoly power. Nobody would be paying any attention to their bs if they were not in possession of this monopoly power.

Where does their "right" to affect the fate of millions of businesses, and that of millions of people working in them, emanate from?

They simply have no such "right" - they are merely abusing their dominant / monopoly position, and this is illegal, both in the EU and the USA. The problem here is the idleness, laziness, inaction, etc, of the civil servants manning the anti-trust authorities, who are doing nothing about this - as is their duty to do.

What the NPR story fails to address is that the guy rewriting all of his product descriptions really doesn't know if that's the problem and is probably just wasting his time.

I spent a few hours reviewing the One Way Furniture website when he first started whining a while back. Product Descriptions are the least of his worries. That site is a technical mess from all angles. This is what happens when you get a site owner who thinks they know SEO. He's looking in all the wrong places. The internal link saturation on that site is horrendous.

They threw the entire kitchen sink at the site navigation and created taxonomy turmoil. There's major duplication of navigation links, at least 2 each per page. Heck on most pages there are 8 links back to the home page. Many of the hard coded internals are referenced 3, 4, and up to 5 times per page. That's what I call link saturation. Also, the static repetitive stuff far outweighs anything unique on the product pages, the site is overly-saturated with static navigation, mostly keyword rich links. Overkill.

It appears they already fixed one issue that was present last time I checked, the top nav links were non-functional if you didn't accept their cookies. There are way too many links "per page" with that setup they have going. That's just my opinion. ;)

The problem here is the idleness, laziness, inaction, etc, of the civil servants manning the anti-trust authorities, who are doing nothing about this - as is their duty to do.

IMO it will be a very long time before we see any serious challenge to Google by USA government officials. A few years ago I had the opportunity at a dinner party to speak with a lawyer from the NY Attorney General's office. This young man worked in the internet division of that office, so you would think he'd be up on search technology. Yet, when I spoke to him about Google's emerging monopoly position, he was clueless. In fact, all he did was spout the same PR that Google puts out to the public, specifically, "Google intentions are to do good". I was flabbergasted.

I'll go further ~ if any USA state attorney general attempts to take on Google, that individual will get a phone call from the Feds instructing him or her to back off immediately. Google is simply too well connected to the PTB for there to be any challenge. At this point in time, if the Europeans don't check Google's power, it will not be done.

Government intrusion may in fact complicate the disaster ~ we don't know what we don't know ~ but for millions of siteowners that have been destroyed by the Panda slaughter, there is nothing further to lose.

@scooterdude, I missed that thread ~ thanks ~ maybe the gov will start looking under some rocks, though I'll be genuinely surprised if anything changes. I just hope the gov puts their best people on it, because if nothing happens, it may embolden Google even more.

So it's official, Panda has nothing to do with quality, just write some non-sense to fool Google.

It's actually everything to do with quality.

Maybe. But it's only made things worse because the Panda changes weren't good enough. In all my areas (100+ websites) all the "good quality spam" (i.e. the stuff that probably wasn't totally providing something extra for the user that they couldn't get better from a better site) is being picked out by this new Panda thingy.

BUT -- all the small time, really awful spam is being left behind and rising to the top to replace it. Some of these sites have 2-5 popups when you land, five adsense blocks supressing the actual text, are copyright infringers, keyword SERPS pages etc.

All Panda did was sink the "good spammy content" like About.com and eHow. There are too many variants in the "bad spammy content" sites for them all to get caught so they are now reaching the top 10.

Bing's share will continue to rise as people realise that they are better off with a search engine that allows the good spam to suppress the bad spam. ;)

> Bing's share will continue to rise as people realise that they are better off (...)

When? Most people use Google and will continue to do so. Many even think Google IS the Internet, not just a search engine! That's a lot of ground for Bing or any other also-rans to make up. I don't see it happening anytime soon.